HISTORY OF COMPUTER

One of the earliest machines designed to assist people in calculations was abacus which is still being used
some 5000 years after its invention.

 Blaise Pascal:
In 1642 Blaise pascal (a famous French mathematician) invented an adding
machine based on mechanical gears in which numbers were represented by the cogs on the
wheels.
 Charles Babbage:

Englishman, Charles Babbage, invented in the 1830’s a “Difference Engine”

made out of brass and pewter rods and gears and also designed a further device which he called an
“Analytical Engine”. His design contained the five key characteristics of modern computers:-

1. An input deice
2. Storage for numbers waiting to be processed
3. A processor or number calculator
4. A unit to control the task and the sequence of its calculations
5. An output device

Augusta Ada Byron (late countess of Lovelace) was an associate of Babbage who has become known as
the first computer programmer.

 Herman Hollerith:

An American, Herman Hollerith, developed (around 1890) the first

electrically driven device. It utilized punched cards and metal rods which passed through the holes
to close an electrical circuit and thus cause a counter to advance. This machine was able to
complete the calculation of the 1890 U.S census in 6 weeks compared with 7 1/2 years for the
1880 census which was manually counted.

 Howard Aiken:

In 1936 Howard Aiken of Harward Universityconvinced Thomas Watson of IBM of

invest $1 million in the development of an electromechanical version of Babbege’s analytical
engine. The Harwad Mark 1 was completed in 1944 and was 6 feet high and 55 feet long.
 John Atanasoff:

At about the same time (the late 1930’s) Johan Atansoff of Lowa state University and
his assistant Clifford Berry built the first digital computer that worked electronically, the ABC (Atansoff-
Berry Computer). This machine was basically a small calculator.

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  John Mauchly and J.Presper Eckert:

In 1943, as part of the British war effort, a series of vaccum tube

based computers ( named Colossus) were developed to crack German secret codes. The Colossus
Mark 2 series consisted of 2400 vacum tubes. John Mauchly and J.Presper Eckert of the University of
pnnsylvania developed these ideas further by proposing a huge machineconsisting of 18,000 vaccum
tubes. ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer) was born in 1946. It was a huge
machine with a huge power requirement and two major disadvantages. Maintainance was exremely
difficult as the tubes broke down regularly and had to be replaced, and also thre was a big problem with
overheating. The most important limitation, however was that every time a new task needed to be
performed the machine need to be rewired. In other words prodramming was carried out with a
soldering iron.

 John Von Neumann:

In the late 1940’s John Von Neumonn ( at the time a special consultant to the
ENIAC team) develped the EDVAC (Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer) which pioneered
the “Stored Program Concept”. This allowed programs to be read into the computer and so gave birth to
the age of general-purpose computers.

 The Generations Of Computers:

It used to be quite popular to refer to computers as belonging to one of several “generations” of

computer. These generations are:-

 The First Generation (1943-1958):

This generation os often described as starting with the delivery of the first
commercial computer to a bussiness client. This happened in 1951 with the delivery of the UNIVAC to
the US Bureau of the Census.this generation lasted until about the end of the 1950’s(although some
stayed in operation much longer than that). The main defining feature of the first generation of coputers
was that vaccum tubes were used as internal computer components, vaccum tubes are generally about
5-10 centimeters in length and the large numbers of them required in computers resulted in huge and
extremely expensive machines that often broke down (as tubes failed).

 The Second Generation (1959-1964):

In the mid-1950’s Bell Labs dvelopedthe transistor transistors were capable of

performing many of the same tasks as vaccum tubes but were only a fraction of the size. The first
transistor-based computer was produced in 1959.transistors were not only smaller, enabling computer
size to be reduced, but they were faster,faster more reliable and consumed less electricity.

The other main improvement of this period was the development of computer languages. Assembler
languages or Symbolic languages allowed programmers to specify instructions in words which were
then translated into a form that the machines cold understand (typically series of 0’s and 1’s: binary
code).Higher level languages also came into being during this period. Whereas assembler languages
had a one-to-one correspondance between their symbols and actual machine fnctions, higher level

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 language commands often represt complex sequences of machine codes. Two higher-level languages
developed during this period (Forton and Cobol) are still in use today though in a much more
developed form.

 The Third Generation (1965-1970):

In 1965 the first Integrated Circuit (IC) was developed in which a complete circuit
hundreds of component s were able to be placed on a single silicon chip 2 or 3 mm square. Computers
using theses IC’s soon replaced transistor based machine. Again, one the major advantages was size, with
computers becoming more powerful and at the same time much smaller and cheaper. Computers thus
become accessible to much larger audience. An added advantage of smaller size is that electrical signals
have much shorter distances to travel and so the speed of computers increased.

Another feature of this period is that computer software became much more powerful and flexible and for
the first time more than one program could share the computer’s resources at the same time (multi tasking).
The majority of programming languages used today are often referred to as 3GL’s (3rd generation
languages) even though some of them orginated during the 2nd generation.

 The Fourth Generation (1971-1980):

The bondry between the third and fourth generations is not very clear-cut at
all. Most of the developments since the mid 1960’s can be seen as part of a continuum of gradual
miniaturisation. In 1970 Large scale integration was achieved where the equivalent of thousands of
integrated circuits were crammed onto a single silicon chip. The development again increased
computer performance (especially reliability and speed) whilst reducing computer size and cost. Around
this time the first complete general-purpose microprocessor became avaliable on a single chip. In 1975
Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI)took the process one step further. Complete computer central
processors could now be built into one chip. The microcomputer was born. Such chips are far more
power ful than ENIAC and are only about 1cm square whilst ENIAC filled a large building.

During this period Fourth Generation Languages (4GL’s) have come into existance. Such languages
are a step furtherremoved from the computer hardware in that they use language much like natural
language. Many database languages can be described as 4GL’s. They are generally much easier to
learn than are 3GL’s.

 The Fifth Generation (1980-onwords):

The “fifth generation”of computers were defined by the japanese government in

1980 when they unvieled an optimistic ten years plan to produce the next generation of computers. This
was an interesting plan for two reasons. Firstly,it is not at all really clear what the fourth generation is, or
even whether the third generation had finished yet. Secondly, it was an attemot to define a generation
of computers before they had come into existance. The main requirement of the 5G machines was that
they incorporate the features Artificial Intelligence , Expert Systems, and Natural Language. The goal
was to produce machines that are capable of performing tasks in similar ways to humans, are capable
of learning, and are capable of interacting with humans in natural language and preferably using both
speech input (speech recognition) and speech output(speech synthesis). Such goals are obviously of
interest to linguists and speech scientists as natural language and speech processing are key

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 componenets of the definition. As you may have guessed, this goal has not yet been fully realised,
although significant progress has been made towards various aspects of these goals.

 Parallel Computing:

Up until recently more computers were serial computers. Such computers had a single processor
chip containing a single processors. Parallel computing is based on the idea that if more than one
task can be processed simultaneously on multiple processors than a program would be able to run
more rapidly than it could run on a single processor. The supercomputers of the 1990’s, such as
the cray computers, were extremely expensive to purchase (usually over $1,000,000) and often
required cooling by liquid helium so they were also very expensive to run. Clusters of networked
computers (eg. A Beowulf cluster of PCs running Linux) have been,since1994, a much cheaper
solution to the problem of fast processing of complex computing tasks. By 2008,most new desktop
and laptop computers contained more than one processor on a single chip(eg.the Intel”Core 2
Duo” released in 2006 or the Intel “Core 2 Quad”released in 2007). Having multiple processors
does not necessarily mean that parallel computing will work automatically. The operating system
must be able to distribute programs between the processors (eg.recent versions of Microsoft
Windows and Mac OS X can do this). An individual program will only be able to take advantage of
multiple processors if the computer language it’s written in is able to distribute tasks within a
program between multiple processors. For example, openMP supports parallel programming in
Fortran and C/C++.

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